Joe searched through paintings, mostly oils, and chose a small one,
unframed, that had been done earlier that year--a spring scene of the
woods at the edge of the field behind the barn. The leaves were just
out, and his father had captured the delicate early green, chartreuse,
that is gone in a week. The young leaves were modestly and unashamedly
tender. There was nice work with interarching birches among the other
trees and in the meeting of the woods and the field, but the light on
the leaves was the main act.
"A good one," Brendan said.
"Not too big, easy to mail."
"I'll bet you could carry it on the plane, if you packed it," Brendan
said. They rummaged around and found a shipping box just large enough
for the painting and the drawing.
"Good idea," Joe said. "Now I even have the money to frame it. How are
you doing these days, by the way?"
"Not bad. I'm teaching a course at a community college. Of course, the
bay area is expensive. Wheeler's making the big bucks. It's a full time
job just keeping him out of trouble, making sure he eats right, and so
on." Brendan grinned. "I can't imagine what the house is going to be
like when I get back. Wheeler hasn't put anything away since he was
born. He just picks things up and carries them to different places."
"Creative chaos," Joe said.
"Great, until you need the garlic press."
"I'm with you," Joe said. "I hate looking for things. Wheeler is an
excellent fellow, though." He pictured Wheeler, very tall, hawk nosed,
wearing glasses, bent over an architectural drawing, the top of his
head seeming to glow.
"Oh, I couldn't survive without him," Brendan said, taking another
swallow of Laphroaig. "He was a hard man, our father. Maybe you didn't
know, not having lived with him and all."
"I suppose so," Joe said. "Did he give you a hard time when you, umm,
came out?"
"No," Brendan said, "he was fine about that. 'Whatever works,' he said.
It was the art thing--that any other way of life was less worthy.
Helping in the community, working with people, he couldn't see that as
important. It wouldn't have been, for him, I guess." Brendan shrugged.
"I can draw, you know. But I never got off on it." Joe reached out and
patted him on the back, not knowing what to say.
They went into the house, and Joe packed the drawing with the oil
painting. He put the box on the back seat of the rental car and stopped
to pick a few strawberries from the patch of everbearing plants by the
end of the barn.
"I love those strawberry plants," he said to Ann in the kitchen.
"October and they're still working."
"Your father loved them, too."
Joe prowled around the bookshelves and found an Arthur W. Upfield
mystery that he hadn't read. "Great stuff," he said later, as they ate
a light dinner of soup and salad. "Off to yet another corner of
Australia while Napoleon Bonaparte gets his man."
"The keen senses of the aboriginal combined with the rational faculties
of the white man," Brendan said.
_Death of a Lake_ is the one I remember," Ann said. "Year after year,
the lake shrinking, the birds, the fish . . . " She shuddered.
"More wine, mother?"
"Yes, a little."
The next day passed quietly. Brendan split and Joe stacked a large pile
of firewood. Ann went shopping. They took naps. Brendan and Joe went
out for dinner to the "Fisherman's Friend."
"Now that's a haddock plate!" Joe said.
"Finest kind," Brendan agreed. "La Nouvelle Cuisine has not reached
Stonington." They had coffee and mammoth pieces of pie.
"Ann seems to be taking it pretty well," Joe said.
"She's a trooper," Brendan said. "What was your mother like? You know,
I grew up with that drawing. Whenever I saw you, I always felt the
similarity."
Joe leaned back in his chair, surprised. "Well, she wasn't a trooper.
She was talented, I guess."
"Do you think of her often?"
"Hardly ever--not very good memories."
"Like?"
Joe sipped coffee. "She was always leaving me places. Once, when I was
six, she left me with an old couple in New York. They were very old.
They made me stay in a playpen for a week."
"A week?"
"Yeah. It was torture. I was used to having the run of the block. It
was summer. The playpen was by a window where I could see the street;
that was good, anyway. I remember the dust floating in the room."
"How awful," Brendan said. Memories rushed into Joe's mind as though a
lock had been picked.
"I used to listen to radio shows every day at five o'clock. Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon and his Great Dog, King. On KING! AroofRoofRoof .
. . " Joe looked around the dining room and lowered his voice. "I found
a dime on the couch one afternoon and showed it to my mother.
"'Where did you get that?' she wanted to know.
"Found it on the couch.
"'Don't lie to me!' she said. 'You stole it, didn't you? Maggie told me
the kids were taking money from little Sean. Tell me the truth.'
"I found it on the couch.
"'You're lying.'
"It's five o'clock--Sergeant Preston . . .
"'You're not listening to the radio until you tell me the truth."'
Joe made a face. "I was so desperate to hear Sergeant Preston that I
told her I stole the dime." Brendan was silent. "She wouldn't believe
me," Joe said. "That was the worst. She wouldn't believe me." Brendan
looked at the napkin Joe had crumpled in one hand, and he shook his
head.
"I guess," Joe said, putting the napkin ball on the table, "if I wanted
to be adult about it, I'd say she was too high strung--one of these
people with major league talent but without the courage to use it."
"Too bad," Brendan said. "We know people like that in San Francisco."
He was genuinely sympathetic.
"I'm glad we had a chance to talk," Joe said, on their way out.
"Right on."
Joe made Ann and Brendan promise to visit him in Hawaii. Ann told them
that she had decided to stay on in the house, at least for a while; she
needed time to adjust. She had friends on the island and money enough
to cope with the coming winter. Joe said that he would be leaving first
thing in the morning and that they shouldn't bother getting up to say
goodbye.
He slept restlessly and dressed at first light. Ann was already up.
"You must have coffee, at least," she said.
"It smells great. Thanks." He poured milk from a little pitcher into a
mug decorated with a Maine Public Radio logo.
"Just like your father," Ann said, "ready to go in the morning."
"Mmm--delicious. Goodbye, Jeremy," he said to the cat who was rubbing
against his ankle, anxious to be let out.
"Well, get going then. Take the mug. Keep it. Maybe it will remind you
of Maine and help bring you back."
"Thanks, Ann. It was very good to see you and Brendan. Take care of
yourself." He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. She followed
him outside and picked up Jeremy, holding him, tawny and orange,
against her white bathrobe as Joe drove away.
He bought a doughnut in Bucksport and took the coastal route for old
time's sake. He stopped for breakfast at Moody's, in Waldoboro. Moody's
hadn't changed much in twenty years; they'd extended the dining room;
the non-smoking area had gotten larger. Waitresses ran chattering back
and forth to the kitchen, unimpressed as ever with anyone who did not
live in Lincoln County. He ate bacon, eggs, toast, and homefries,
taking his time.
The whirlwind visit to Deer Isle was still sinking in. He was having
trouble accepting that his father was dead. It was good of him to have
left the money, and Joe was very glad to have the painting and the
drawing of his mother. First choice. That had been a message of some
kind. He, like Brendan, felt that his father had been disappointed in
him for not living a more artistic life. Too late to talk about it now.
Overboard and gone by, as they said on Deer Isle. "He was a hard man,"
Brendan had said in the barn. Brendan was right, although you had to
know his father well to realize it, what with the big smile, the
blarney and all.
Montpelier, Joe decided. The creative writing program. That was the
thing to do. It would be carrying on something of his father in him,
and the inheritance would take care of his immediate money problems.
When he left Moody's, he was still sad, but at least he had a plan.
He stopped in Portland for the night, thinking that there was no
telling when he'd be back. He decided not to look up Ingrid; she was
off and into her new life. He got a room at the Holiday Inn and walked
around the West End, his old neighborhood.
Houses were being restored. Coffee shops had opened all over the place.
Popeye's, the bar with the tail of a light plane sticking out from its
roof, was just the same. As he walked up Gray Street, Joe saw the small
man who used to collect his returnable bottles. He was on his knees in
front of St. Dominic's, a large church that had been closed and put up
for sale by the Catholic bureaucracy. His shopping cart was beside him,
half full of cans and bottles. The day had turned sharply cold. Joe
felt a rush of complicated emotion. How could this man with nothing,
kneeling on the sidewalk before an empty church, be so complete? Or
so--realized. Joe wanted to salute him as he used to in the old days
after he handed over the bottles, but he did not disturb him. He went
instead to a coffee shop and tried to describe the scene.
Later, the sun was setting as he passed St. Dominic's. Joe stood for a
few minutes and watched a glowing veil withdraw inexorably up the red
brick tower of the church. It was as though the bottle saint had gone
and the service was over. Joe felt like crying, but he was too cold and
alone.
He ate dinner in Giobbi's, a local bar and restaurant with dark booths
along two walls. A messy meeting was in progress at tables that had
been pushed together in the center of the room. Joe held pizza in one
hand and wrote in his notebook with the other while men in late middle
age joked and argued. A man at one end of the tables clinked his glass.
"One thing we gotta take care of," he said. Clink, clink. "One piece of
business . . . " Clink. The group fell quiet. "Now." He cleared his
throat. "Now, you all know Agnes."
"Sure."
"She's been good to us all, right?"
"Yes, yes."
"Agnes."
"Now, some of you may not know the story about her . . . " There were
several questioning sounds and the group fell silent. "This is what
happened. About seventy years ago, there was a knock at the door of the
church. It was a wild rainy morning, and the Father asked one of the
nuns to see who it was. She opened the door. No one was there--only a
basket. She brought the basket in out of the rain and said 'it's a
baby, Father! All wrapped in a sheet.'
"The Father thought. 'We must take care of it,' he said. 'Is it--a boy
or a girl?'
"The nun bent over, unwrapped the baby, and said, 'A girl, Father,
bless her.'
"'She must have a name,' Father said. 'She is a child of God. That we
know. Agnes will be her name.' He looked at the window and said, 'It's
not much of a day out. We will call her, Agnes Grayborn.' So the nuns
took her and raised her, and Agnes has worked all her life for the
church.
"And now, boys, we've had to sell the building where Agnes lives. She
has no place to go." Voices raised and mumbled. A hand came up, halfway
down the group.
"I gotta small place in one of mine. I'll take care of it. Least we can
do."
"Thanks, Tony."
"Yes!" Clapping.
"Agnes!" Glasses were held up.
Well, all right! Joe thought. He left and walked toward the Holiday
Inn. Every once in a while, things work out the way they should. He
felt his resolve to keep going. It was in him like a fist. "I, too, am
a hard man," he said.
16
Sunny Honolulu . . . Joe was relieved to be back. He wrote to Kate,
enclosing her inheritance check and explaining his father's stipulation
concerning the money. "No problem," she e-mailed back, "we're out every
weekend looking at houses." Joe paid his Montpelier tuition and put
some money in the bank, but he couldn't resist buying 4000 shares of a
company that he'd been following on the Internet.
An Italian, whose father was well-known in the steel business, had
developed a new type of composite steel. Stainless steel tubes were
packed with crushed recycled carbon steel and then rolled under heat
and pressure, bonding the whole together. The resulting composite, or
cladded, steel had the outer resistance of stainless but was much
cheaper. There was a huge market for non-corroding rebar to be used in
concrete exposed to the weather, particularly in marine environments
and in roads that were salted during the winter.
The Italian joined forces with a British financier who had a good
reputation. They entered a joint venture with a Korean firm that
subsequently withdrew support for reasons that had nothing to do with
the quality of the product. Their venture went bankrupt, but the two
hung in there and repurchased the mill that they had established in
Wales. They issued stock for operating capital and began to produce
test quantities of the new steel. Joe bought the stock at .75, roughly
the value of the existing mill and property (if the .75 were multiplied
by the number of shares outstanding). His thinking was that he was
getting the life's work of the Italian for nothing and that the product
was bound to catch on eventually. For a small added expense, the life
of a bridge could be effectively doubled. The Brit had a track record
of success. He owned a significant fraction of the company, and hadn't
sold a single share. The company would either license the process to a
steel giant or be bought outright. Joe was fairly sure of this. The
question was when. He had learned his lesson with Southwest Precious
Metals, and he bought for the long haul, an investment, not a trade.
"Definitely fun," he said in the direction of Maine and his father whom
he thought of as still being somewhere near the barn.
On Thanksgiving, after his second annual dinner of parrot fish and
black bean sauce, Joe returned home and pushed the play button on the
answering machine. He heard piano chords, an intro, and then Isabelle's
rich low voice. "Joe, where are you tonight?" A few bars of melody
followed. "Joe . . . " She broke off with a strained laugh and hung up.
"Uh, oh," Joe said. She sounded drunk and far away, as though she were
trying to sing across an ocean. He didn't think that she was on the
island. "Good thing," he said to himself. But he was sad for her. The
old Johnny Cash song went through his mind: _You've got to walk that
lonesome valley. You've got to walk it by yourself_ . . . She was in
trouble for sure. The phone rang. He hesitated and picked it up on the
third ring.
"Hello, Joe."
"Jason?"
"Yup."
"Jesus, I thought it was someone else. Glad it's you. Long time! How
are you?"
"Fine. I'm passing through, thought I'd give you a call and see if we
could get together."
"Sure, great!" They arranged to meet for an early breakfast as Jason
was flying out the next day.
In the morning, Joe spotted Jason at a corner table in the Ilikai.
"You're looking good, man." Jason had a strong build when he was in
high school. He'd put on additional bulk and projected an air of
invincible solidity. His hair was closely trimmed; his clothes were
casual and elegant.
"You too," Jason said. His blue eyes twinkled. "What's it been? Twenty
years?"
"Close to it," Joe said. "I love that tape of Chesapeake Bay chanteys,
by the way."
"We had fun with it," Jason said.
Joe slid into a chair. "It was nice hearing your voice--got me across
North Dakota and Montana last year."
"Just a foc'sle tenor," Jason said and explained that he was on his way
home from Singapore--a conference on Data Protocols for the 21st
Century. "We gave a paper," he said. "My colleague flew back the other
way; she has family in Amsterdam."
"My, my," Joe said. "I was just an in-the-trenches programmer,
designing small systems." Jason nodded sympathetically. Joe was
confused. The best banjo player he'd ever heard was returning from an
international data conference? In high school, Jason was a football
player and a star in the drama club. "I quit programming," Joe said.
"It was burning out my brain. I never much liked it anyway."
"I know what you mean," Jason said.
"How did you get into the info game?"
"One thing leads to another," he said. "You pitch in, give a hand, go
with the flow." He expanded as he talked. His jaw was set as he carved
into his Mauna Kea, half a papaya beneath eruptions of granola, fruit,
and yogurt. "Keeps me in toys," he said, relaxing.
"Good deal," Joe said. "I wouldn't mind some toys. I'm on the way to
becoming a starving artist--writing things." Jason shook his head
admiringly. "You get back to Woodstock, much?" Joe asked.
"Oh sure, holidays now and then. I got your address from Morgan."
"How's he doing? He was out with his lady a while back--Edie. She was
nice."
"I met her," Jason said. "Good things come in small packages." He
frowned. "I saw Daisy in the village. I know you and Daisy were tight."
"True," Joe said.
"I guess Wes isn't well. Could be bad."
"Oh?"
"Daisy wasn't optimistic."
"Damn," Joe said. "My father just died."
"My mom died," Jason said and looked like himself for the first time.
"I liked your mom," Joe said.